The Grasshopper's Run Page 2

  The boy sat down on one of the cane chairs. Between him and the headmaster was a special bond of a different nature, that of mutual respect, bordering, on the older man’s side, on occasional amazement. The boy was always correct and formal in Bartlett’s presence, even during his visits to Gojen’s father’s plantation and their travels in the forests. But he also knew he need not hesitate with Bartlett.

  Rajkhowa was a third-generation student here. His grandfather and grand-uncles, his father and all his uncles had been here, and he was the first of his generation. Although it was joked sometimes back home that all that education had not made them entirely sane, they were as much a tradition here as Evening Service and Family Visit Day and Matriculation results.

  ‘Sir, you remember Shiluti?’

  The headmaster nodded, his attention on the boy, knowing he had not dropped in (without a tie) for a mere hello. ‘Yes, of course, Shiluti. Shilukaba’s grandson. I remember. Remarkable boy. It’s a pity we can’t have him here as well, instead of living with the old man. He has the makings of a fine man.’

  ‘He is dead.’

  And the boy explained, as the Naga had to him. The headmaster took it as he had, grave and silent, dispensing with the usual solicitations, for he was a similar man. The boy gave him the paper.

  ‘I thought maybe you could have a look at this and tell me what it means. The old man thinks it could tell us what happened.’

  Or who it was, but he did not voice that.

  Rev. Bartlett took out his spectacles and frowned over the paper, ignoring but not forgetting the brown smudges on it.

  ‘It looks like a translation script, as I am sure you have guessed. We were given some of these during the war, you know. Who is your commander, put down your rifle, put your hands up, that kind of thing. Helps when you are fighting someone who doesn’t talk your language. Same as the English sentences, probably some very basic words. I am afraid I don’t know Japanese, my boy. But since it comes with a heading and is signed by someone or the other, I think … yes, we can find a name.’

  The headmaster thought for a while. He, too, knew the right person to ask. ‘Who brought the message, an Ao?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘From the way they treat you, he must be a chief. Tell the khalasi to have the guest room ready, and tell the gentleman he is welcome to stay here.’

  And meanwhile, I will get to the bottom of this.

  *

  Calcutta was under siege. From the middle of 1941, blink-and-you-miss-it Dum-Dum Airport and the smaller RAF strip at Barrackpore had been bursting at the seams with RAF and Royal Navy Aviation transports, fighters and bombers. The train station was filled with soldiers, the harbour and small jetties up and down the Hooghly blocked with uniforms and suppliers’ consignments. From 1942, the Americans had joined the show. Civilian traffic—what few flights there had been before the war—was almost dead, commandeered aircraft too bringing troops and heavier transports flying in tanks and artillery, all heading north and east into Assam, Burma and beyond. Squadrons of fighters and bombers refuelled and flew east.

  On 2 December 1942, the 1st Imperial Japanese Air Force squadrons had hammered the former Indian capital with bombing raids. Their target was Howrah Bridge, and although they missed that artery, they did succeed in bleeding the city of more than 250,000 civilians who decided life was too short to be given up between the British and the Japanese.

  Calcutta was otherwise as it had always been, but since 1911 it had been settling into a kind of disgruntled decline, as if it had woken up one morning to discover ‘What! I am not the capital any more?’ and had refused to believe it since. It was a look and an architectural attitude that would last for a long time.

  Opposite the faux-Minerva Temple Mint and two hundred yards down Strand Road, down a quiet alley, was a thick teak door. Just a plain unadorned door, with no markings or signs indicating what it might be, except a small insignia of some regiment or the other that hinted at an Army connection. The huge Pathan at the door was enough notice to the accidental visitor to stay away.

  Rev. Bartlett was let in to the club or café, or a judicious cross of both. Inside were dark brown leather chairs and recliners and a few diners, none he recognised, a constant possibility in this place where the cream of the armed forces of the Raj sometimes gathered. His man, as he knew, was in the smoking section and had probably been drinking for a while.

  ‘Why, bless me, ’tis the Reverend Private himself,’ said the thickset man in civvies, rising and snapping off a salute and for added measure, a Catholic three-finger benediction.

  ‘Kenneally, glad you could make it,’ said the Reverend, settling down and pulling up his cuffs.

  ‘Of course, I don’t mind. I am at a loose end as always. Hardly anything to do,’ said the other.

  It was as much a lie as the Catholic salute. Lt Colonel John Kenneally, formerly of the Irish Guards Regiment, now a mover and very shaken shaker with the Intelligence Corps, was one of the busiest and most-cursed soldier boys in Calcutta at that moment.

  Kenneally was an Irishman, but with many differences. For one, he was Protestant. For another, he had been born and lived in England throughout, son of a dock worker from Liverpool, where he had grown up and got a decent school education before joining the Guards’ draft in 1914. One of the few Irishmen Bartlett knew who could not box, Kenneally had a dogged persistence while on a case, a quality appreciated in the Intelligence Corps if not in civilian intelligence, which demanded the flashes of brilliance of the Oxford dons who populated it during this war.

  The waiter came and topped up Kenneally’s whisky, good strong Army drink as always, but Bartlett, remembering he had to lead Evening Service in school that evening, chose a light port.

  The two men went back a long way, longer than anyone would have guessed now, looking at the career soldier and the career cleric. Nearly two-and-half years in the trenches of France can create a bond not easily understood by those who never slept with French rats and German artillery shelling for company or jumped the barbed wire half in obedience to someone’s orders, half to get away from the rats.

  ‘You have been fine, I can see that. Takes more than war rations to remove the shine from young Bartlett’s apple cheeks, I have told myself,’ said Kenneally.

  ‘The school is fine,’ the Reverend acknowledged.

  The drinks arrived.

  ‘Well, what else, to Triumph and Disaster, the two Imposters,’ said Kenneally, raising his whisky. In his cups he tended to overdo the club routine.

  ‘I met him, you know, in 1934 in England,’ said Bartlett.

  ‘Who, Jack’s father?’

  ‘He was all right, it seemed. We talked about the War. I told him about how much that poem meant to us in the trenches. Suppose he heard that all the time.’

  ‘He took it hard. Pity.’

  ‘To Jack, and all the Jacks this show is throwing up.’

  ‘To Jack. Quis separabit.’ Who shall separate us: their regimental motto.

  And the two soldiers drank to the third, and remembered a slight, bespectacled young man who had shared the trenches with them for a day at Loos in 1915, shared the brotherhood of all soldiers of all times but had never returned home.

  ‘John, I have something here I want you to see. This remains between you and me, mind.’

  The Lt Colonel became brisk and interested. ‘Ah, business at last. Out with it.’

  He took the piece of rice-paper and examined it. He didn’t need spectacles. He took his time, which usually meant he was supremely interested.

  ‘George, George,’ he said at last, grinning like a cadet and waving the paper. ‘Own up. What have you been up to? Where would an apparently respectable pillar of the C of E get this?’ He was agitated.

  ‘I cannot tell you that. Someone I know died and this was found near him.’

  ‘Come on, I can see the dried blood as well you can. Where?’

  ‘I cannot tell you that.’

  ‘Where?’

  Bartlett hesitated.

  ‘Out east.’

  ‘Where, Burma, Assam, bloody Singapore?’

  ‘Near Burma.’

  ‘That’s Assam.’

  ‘Somewhere near it. I cannot tell you more.’

  Kenneally’s eyes narrowed inquisitorially. ‘George, don’t tell me you are like what’s-his-name, that fellow. You know, preaching by day and cloaking and daggering by night …’

  ‘I don’t know, Thomas More? Of course not, don’t be an idiot.’

  Pause.

  ‘This chap who died, one of ours?’

  Of course, the real question. One of ours, one of theirs, one of God-knows-whose. Draw the lines, determine the damage.

  No, Kenneally, loyal eavesdropper to His Majesty’s Forces, thought Bartlett, don’t get me into that.

  ‘No.’

  ‘So, a native. Let me see. Japs come across him, he puts up a fight, they snuff out his light.’

  ‘Actually, it was an entire village.’

  ‘Obviously, seeing from this. Tell me, you know any Japanese?’

  ‘Not at all.’

  ‘Hmm. I do. I know a damn sight more Japanese than I care to, anyhow. But you knew it, so you brought me this piece of paper.’

  ‘You know what it says?’

  ‘Of course I do. Now tell me why you want to know.’

  ‘Academic curiousity.’

  Kenneally snorted. ‘You are no more an academic than I am a belly-dancer. You want to know what and why and, in particular, who was the beggar behind the show, that’s what you want.’

  It was too true to deny.

  ‘I’ll give you the short version for now, but let me tell you, old boy, this paper is a coup. For me. Yes, indeed.’


  Go on.

  Kenneally composed himself like an orator, for the vanities of youth die hard, and many ages ago he was the student and Bartlett was the shooter.

  ‘This here is a translator’s paper, like always. The Nips give it to a few in each unit, just in case they seem to be in the mood for prisoners, which they are not in Burma, by God.’

  ‘How are things there?’

  ‘You heard about Hope-Thompson?’

  ‘All over the papers. The Brigade withdrew.’

  ‘Didn’t have a choice. Best he could do was a delaying action. The Japs are swarming into Assam now. We are sending men as fast as possible into those bleeding hills. Why, the brass plucked out a whole bunch from amphibian training down in Madras for some lunatic plan of landing on the beaches of Burma, and is rushing them by yesterday up the hills. Much good that will do. They want Kohima and Imphal and all points west. Beyond that, we don’t know for certain. And if the boys here stopped protesting and wanting us out it could be easier. You didn’t hear it from me. Now this … this paper. It upsets everything.’

  I am still listening …

  ‘At the top, see this? That’s Hohei Sanju-ichi Shidan. IJA 31st Division. That’s the lot up there. Next to that, typical Jap beggars, that’s Retsu Heidan. Furious Division. That’s their call sign. What they are furious about, I don’t know. Bunch of second-raters, if you ask me. Set up Bangkok, 22 March last year. Reservists. Not good enough for the Pacific or the swamps out in Indonesia, but their top hats think good enough for India.’ He was reciting from memory now, touching on a familiar obsession.

  ‘This one is the 1st Communications Unit of the Division. Far as we know, set up as a backroom monitoring and reconnaissance unit. Special command structure. Last heard of forty miles east of the Chindwin. Seen near Tamu, small border town east of Manipur, maybe six weeks ago. Then, nothing.

  ‘This document is so much wind, simple instructions for their Privates and Superior Privates. But it is signed …’

  Here Kenneally leaned forward as much as his bulk and the table permitted, looking comically intense, staring at Bartlett.

  ‘What do you know of Nanjing?’

  And Bartlett chanced on something big.

  On 13 December 1937, Nanjing, the capital of the new Chinese Republic was finally occupied by the Japanese. Almost from the moment the soldiers entered the city, till February the following year, civilians and prisoners of war were lined up and shot. For being soldiers, for being sympathisers, for simply walking past the occupiers, for the flimsiest of reasons.

  ‘That is right. You know how many? Our government and Uncle Sam agree to 200,000, but I think it is more. It is always more, and you know this as well I do,’ said Kenneally, draining his whisky and calling for more. He had a special dark place in his heart for massacres.

  He had good reason to. On 3 May 1916, armed Irish Catholic militiamen had burnt his grandmother’s farmstead at County Kildare with her, Kenneally’s uncles, aunts and cousins inside. What made it worse was it was a planned tactic in a war of attrition where such attacks against civilians were secretly encouraged by both sides.

  ‘Timperley, that was the Manchester Guardian chap in China, sent despatches through most of it. They did not print the worst of what he mentioned, obviously. I have copies of them all. Another fellow called Magee made a film or something. Things to give you nightmares, Bartlett. Nightmares. I have a cutting from a Jap newspaper. These two Jap soldiers with their swords, the headline talking about how they had a contest to see who killed more than a hundred fastest.’

  Kenneally went on, remembering. Bartlett had heard some of it from him before, but this was a letting go. ‘One of them, Mukai, I think, had 106. The other, Noda, had 105. Posing with their swords for the newspapers.’

  He shook his head to snap out of it.

  ‘Sorry, forgot myself there. Anyway, the Japs were commanded by Asaka, one of their princes. I suppose after the war when we line them all up they will go red shouting they only followed orders. Your man here,’ he tapped the sheet, ‘Colonel Shunroku Mori. As special advisor on the staff of General Iwane Matsui at Nanjing. Know who he is?’

  ‘Mori? Never heard the name before.’

  ‘The greatness of evil is in its anonymity, isn’t it? Graduate from their Army War College, Tokyo, 1930 or thereabouts. Classmate and close friend of Hattori, who is now secretary to Prime Minister Tojo himself. Mori is right up there with the high rollers in Tokyo. Another junior from the same college, chap called Tsuji, planned the Singapore invasion and Pearl Harbor. Now, Mori was on that staff back in Nanjing, see? Made all the plans for the occupation. A typical backroom tactician: planning, plotting, hungry as old Bonaparte. Without a doubt he was the one who came up with the massacre idea.

  ‘Mori went to Singapore in ’42 and what do we have? Sook Ching. Same, what do you say, modus operandi. Catch ’em, kill ’em, yee-haw! Sorry, our American cousins’ methods of expression seem to rub off constantly.

  ‘Anyway, Sook Ching. Chinese and Malays. I honestly do not know how many. I don’t want to know. Sods even have a word for it. They call it Kakyoshukusei. Purging the Chinese.’

  ‘That’s enough whisky, don’t you think?’

  ‘Nothing wrong with the whisky. Nothing wrong with me. Anyhow, there’s your chap. He has personal and absolute command over this unit. Two massacres known, this little one now, God knows how many from China to Burma. Stops at nothing, thick with the high rollers, sake mate with everyone except Hirohito, and that must not be through lack of trying, I’ll wager. If I could get my hands on him, I could put up so much evidence to hang him a hundred times over. Didn’t think I would get the chance.

  ‘Now, you say he is somewhere in Assam commanding his personal bunch of recon beggars who think he is halfway there to Confucius or whoever they worship, and I tell you this. If he is here, the Japs have not come for bloody Kohima or for bloody Imphal. He won’t even stop in Calcutta. That man is going straight to Delhi as surely as you shot that German at 150 yards, back in ’15.

  ‘So you tell your native boys or whoever gave you this to pack their hearths and homes on their outsize cows and run off the hills like the devil’s right behind them. Because he is. Tell them old Kenneally said this, and he knows.’

  Chapter 2

  Home. Or near enough, thought Rajkhowa. They were crossing where the Manas river met with the Brahmaputra or as he preferred to call it, Luit, and hundreds of years of being the western tip of the Ahom kingdom gave it the feel of crossing a certain line. Home. Or near enough.

  The river here was broad and both banks were pushed far away near the horizon. To the left, southwards, was a hint of pale blue against the cloudy sky, the first of the Khasi and Garo Hills. Nearer and along the banks were the swamps. The river was a muddy mass of fast currents, undercurrents and small whirlpools. They would sometimes pass fishing boats and cross-bank ferries, fishermen with their nets cast into the waters for the good catches they would get just before the rains set in.

  Occasionally he saw a grey shape break water, and he made a quick estimate of its speed, the ferry’s speed, relative distance and time, looked ahead and at the exact spot he looked, the dolphin broke for air again.

  This was a week into the journey upriver from Calcutta, and the boy was sitting in his favourite spot on these passages, up atop the steering cabin aft of the ferry, which from a distance looked more like a three-storeyed house floating ponderously on the river than a steamboat.

  Coal was not a problem in Assam, with its mines, and the ships, made of steel and floored with wood, had comfortable rooms for families for the ten days of travel from Calcutta to East, or Upper Assam.

  The boy sat atop the cabin where a bearer would call him down for lunch, glad no one on the ship—filled more with soldiers than Assamese—had recognised him. He did not want anyone, except the unavoidables, to know he was coming home. Mopumeren was somewhere on the bridge, talking to some acquaintance he had made.

  The boy was in his shorts, vest and barefoot. If the sun came out he would have to step down before the tin roof heated up, but for now the river breeze nudged his toes and round the side of his neck and the letter in his hand.